Career Details

I completed a BA in History at the University of York (1998) before studying for an MSc in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine/University of London (1998-1999). I then returned to York for my PhD in History (2000-2004). My first academic job was as Lecturer in Modern British and European History at the University of Kent (2005-2007). Following this I was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester (2007-2010). Before arriving at Lancaster in 2022 I was Senior Lecturer and, later, Reader in History at the University of Roehampton (2010-2022).

Research Interests

My research interests encompass a range of topics in the cultural history of Britain in the long nineteenth century (1760-1914). Broadly speaking, they fall into two principal areas, namely medicine and surgery on the one hand, and war on the other. However, these interests have often overlapped and are linked by a broader commitment to the history of the body, gender, the emotions, and, increasingly, materiality.

In 2024, in collaboration with Prof. Joanne Begiato of the London College of Fashion, I was awarded a major AHRC Standard Research Grant for a project entitled The Victorian Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, and Identity, Past and Present. This grant, which runs from 2024 to 2028 combines academic historical research with a major programme of public and professional engagement as well as artistic and cultural production. In an age of social media and self-curation, bodies are critical to how we construct and present our identities. The roots of this lie in the nineteenth century, when the body became a powerful mechanism for reading inner qualities from external appearances and when the hand came to function as a way of negotiating the complexities of a globalised, urbanised, technologised modernity. Hands proliferated in textual, visual, material, and symbolic form as markers of character, class, race, gender, and sexuality. Artists cast hands of the 'great and good' to capture their noble character, while eugenicists classified criminal and racial 'types' through fingerprints and measurements. From surgeons to factory 'hands', they embodied the morality of work, while charities offered a 'helping hand' to the needy. Our project uses history to stimulate dialogue about the place of emotional embodiment in our personal and social lives, revealing the hand's vital role as both a tool of objectification and an agent of self-empowerment. Working with surgeons, quilters, artists, and young people, we will disrupt stereotypes and gender biases around hands and craft, emotions and bodies, through reflection on 'different' hands (young and old, abled and disabled, and varied genders and ethnicities). In so doing we will not only advance academic scholarship but also promote wellbeing, and generate creative interventions that communicate the relevance of the arts and humanities, exciting popular interest among those intrigued by the Victorians and the role of the body in making us who we are.

Between 2016 and 2021 I was Principal Investigator on a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award project entitled Surgery & Emotion (108667/Z/15/Z). This project charted the emotional landscape of surgery in Britain from c.1800 to the present and consisted of a team of three researchers, an engagement officer and a PhD student. To date, it has produced nearly twenty academic outputs including three monographs published or in press and a special edited issue of Medical Humanities. My most recent book, Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793-1912 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) derives from this project. In addition to this we also ran a range of professional and public engagement activities and produced four films about our research, which you can watch here.

I have also published on the cultural history of war and gender in nineteenth-century Britain. This research includes an article on empire, technology, and military masculinity for Cultural and Social History and a co-edited collection (for which I also co-wrote a chapter) entitled Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2019, pbk 2021). I am currently developing these interests into a major research project on the emotional, material, and sensory dimensions of late Victorian and Edwardian popular militarism.

My first book, which derived from my PhD, was entitled Performing Medicine: Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c.1760-1850 (Manchester University Press, 2011). This explored the changing configurations of medical identity across the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from a culture of intellectual liberality and civic inclusivity to one of collective professional self-identification and disciplinary exclusivity. I have explored other aspects of the cultural, ideological, and ideational elaboration of medical modernity in a range of articles in journals such as English Historical Review, Journal of British Studies, Social History, and Journal of Social History.

Research Grants

• 2024-2028 - with Prof. Joanne Begiato, ‘The Victorian Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, and Identity, Past and Present’, AHRC Standard Research Grant, AH/Z505948/1 (£846,900)
• 2022-2023 - with Prof. Joanne Begiato, Oxford Brookes University Strategic Research Fund (£11,900)
• 2019-2021 - Wellcome Trust Research Enrichment Award: Public Engagement – Surgery & Emotion, 108667/Z/15/B (£19,650)
• 2016-2021 - Wellcome Trust Investigator Award – Surgery & Emotion, 108667/Z/15/Z (£628,760)
• 2007-2010 - Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship (£131,788)

Professional Role

I am currently Deputy Research Director and Postgraduate Research Director for History

PhD Supervision Interests

I am interested in supervising PhD students working on the topics of medicine, surgery, war, gender, bodies, and emotions from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.